4 City of Strife Read Online Free

actually.”
    Kormak remembered that man all too well. His name had been Venn. He had dabbled in the darkest of sorceries. It had taken a month to catch him. A lot of people had died.
    He pushed himself up from the bed and walked over to her. “Why are you telling me this?”
    She turned half away from him, avoiding looking up into his face. “You did tell me you might have to leave town quickly. You never told me why.”
    “The contract I was waiting for came through. There was war along the Valkyrian border.”
    “Aye, there was,” she said, like someone who wanted very badly to believe. Her jaw quivered for a moment and then she took a step away from him. “The thing about those bodies was it was all so neat. There were no wounds on them. So they say.”
    “Taking a man’s head off usually means you don’t need to stab him,” said Kormak.
    “What sort of man can do that though?” she said. “Who could trap four armed men and behead them? And how—they were all big, powerful men. A couple of them had proved they could fight. Marcus had killed three men in duels.”
    “Again, why are you telling me this? It’s interesting, I admit, but it’s old news.”
    “It was a nine-day wonder,” she said. “Everybody talked about it. They thought there might be a madman loose but no one else was killed. Then the other rumours started. That the dead men had been in a cult of some sort, that dead girls were found in a secret room in the Cathedral foundation—you remember the young girls who went missing, don’t you?”
    Kormak nodded. He remembered finding the girls’ mutilated bodies all too well. He sometimes saw their faces in his darker dreams. He forced the frown from his face.
    “There was all sorts of talk, that a dark consecration had been taking place, that the dead men had been making sacrifices to the Shadow. And then suddenly it was all hushed up. It became one of those things that nobody wanted to talk about. The priests all started preaching from the pulpit about tellers of tales and gossips. Somebody, somewhere very high up had decided to sweep the whole thing under the carpet or so it seemed to me.”
    He put an arm around her waist. She shivered and leaned back against him. “You’ve obviously given this matter a lot of thought.” He kept his voice very flat.
    She gave a bitter laugh. “Am I boring you?”
    “I can think of more interesting things than talk.” He tilted her head and kissed her on the mouth. She started to respond then pushed him away. “No,” she said. “No.”
    She moved back over to the bed, drew her legs up beneath her. “You want to know something,” she said.
    “What?”
    “I wondered about it. I wondered about you. When you left town the killings stopped. No more dead girls. No more headless corpses. The city went back to being normal or as normal as it ever is, anyway.”
    “You think I killed those girls?” She flinched at the cold anger in his voice and shook her head.
    “No,” she said. “I don’t think you killed the girls. You were here with me the night Azara Kendal went missing, and the night Dorothea Spanders was lost as well. And the first of them vanished months before you came to town.”
    He moved over, lay down beside her. She rested her head on his shoulder for a moment. Her long hair tickled his flesh. She looked up at him with frank brown eyes. “After you left, I started asking questions.”
    He stared at her. She stroked the tattoo on his chest, running her finger along the dragon’s folded wings. “I asked about tattoos and dragons. I heard some interesting stories.”
    “Tell me one.”
    “A merchant from Saladar told me about an order of knights, sworn to oppose the Shadow, who bore such tattoos. He told me the order had fallen into darkness and become a cult of paid assassins.”
    “You believe him?”
    “Another man, a soldier . . . like yourself maybe . . . told me of a society sworn to fight the Old Ones. Their badge was a